Friday, 30 June 2017

The Sculpture Garden in Sunlight

by Evelyn Hooven (July 2017)

The Thinker in the Rodin Museum Garden, Paris, France

The setting is the Rodin Museum garden
during an extraordinary heat wave;
fatalities mount; the sculpture speaks: more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 4:13 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

Charlie Faust: Grace's Version

by James Como (July 2017)

NOTE. This dramatic monologue is about what Grace claims: the dangerous intersection of passions, in this case passions for baseball, religion, and story-telling. If one is at that crossroad, as Grace seems to be, can lunacy be far behind? Of course much religious passion is displaced, dragging zealots down into deep water where dwell all sorts of monsters. more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 4:01 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

Spark by Hannah Senesh

Translated from the Hungarian & edited

by Thomas Ország-Land (July 2017)

Hannah Senesh, 1921-1944, (Hungarian spelling Hanna Szenes), poet, farmer, soldier, emigrated as a youth to Palestine to escape rising Fascism in Europe, and eventually joined the British Army there. She was parachuted into partisan-held territory in Croatia from where she trekked to her native Hungary with a mission to rescue downed Allied aircrews and assist the Zionist resistance to the mass murder of Jews. more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 3:28 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

My "Americas’ Game" as an Audio Opera

by Richard Kostelanetz (July 2017)

The Awl, by Tommervik

Some years ago I composed a 60-minute audiotape of and about the sound of baseball as indigenous to the Americas. As it included passages in both Spanish and French-Canadian, I thought that my electro-acoustic composition, to recall a 20th-Century epithet, represented all of North America. more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 2:36 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

The Nation-State: Our Best Guarantor of Democracy

by Lorna Salzman (July 2017)

by Lucas Simoes

In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt discusses the tendency of humans to form into groups as dictated by evolution. The widespread existence of human groups testifies to its power and resilience in both primitive and technologically advanced countries. It may be taking different forms today. more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 2:17 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

The Left Stifles Entrepreneurs and Small Business

By Kenneth Francis (July 2017)

Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930

When Donald Trump last month put climate change on the backburner during the Paris Accord, many non-Green small business owners breathed a sigh of relief. (Remember, the Accord is not mandatory and final. It’s a pledge; and many pledges in the history of politics are broken if not ‘pragmatically’ altered.) more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 2:08 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

Poetical Women in Shakespeare: A Response to Alison Findlay

by David P. Gontar (July 2017)

Margaret of Anjou, Jane Telford, 2013.

Come, wait upon him, lead him to my bower.
The moon, methinks, looks with a wat’ry eye,
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,
Lamenting some enforcèd chastity.
Tie up my love’s tongue; bring him silently.
-Titania

“Do you not know I am a woman? When I think,
I must speak.”
-Rosalind

In a paper subtitled ‘The Poetry of Women in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Verse’,¹one might expect to find stanzas from his most lyrical ladies, among whom we would surely number Isabella, Titania, Tamora, Rosalind, the Weird Sisters, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Queen Katherine of Aragon, Juliet, Paulina and Hermione. Instead, we are presented with subalterns Margaret of Anjou, Princess Catherine of France in King Henry V, the Jailer’s Daughter, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth and other roles not customarily associated with Mt. Parnassus. The explanation lies in writer Alison Findlay’s conception of the poetical as a species of the political, e.g., “women in Shakespeare negotiate a space to speak within a poetic discourse that repeatedly defines them as objects.” more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 1:42 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

Letter to America

by Robert Gear (July 2017)

I first became aware of the slow, insidious gains of creeping Sharia in 1995, sometime after I visited the public library of a large, provincial English City. The library itself was of an eye-wincing brutalist design fashionable in post-war Britain. more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 1:34 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

Wittgenstein and the Comforts of Obscurity

By Ibn Warraq (July 2017)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, artist unknown

A friend of mine, Professor Dominique Urvoy, a distinguished scholar and world authority on Islamic Philosophy and Averroes, was invited to a conference in Morocco a few years ago. At a coffee break, an Arab colleague rushed up to Urvoy and showed him several passages from the Koran (in Arabic, of course) which made no sense syntactically and semantically. Professor Urvoy agreed, whereupon, his Arab colleague exclaimed excitedly, “this shows it is from God”. more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 1:29 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

The Islamic State of Al-Qaeda

By A.J. Caschetta (July 2017)

With Iraqi forces now controlling most of Mosul and the siege of Raqqa underway, many are predicting the imminent demise of the Islamic State. ISIS propagandists argue that the caliphate can withstand the loss of territory, but without a “state” to fight for, many jihadis will look elsewhere for support and inspiration. A patient Ayman al-Zawahiri hopes they will return to Al-Qaeda, his organization since Osama bin Laden’s death. more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 1:17 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

Ratlines on the American Left

by G. Murphy Donovan (July 2017)

Once upon a time, ratlines were horizontal ropes in a ship’s rigging that allowed a sailor to scale the lines or climb a ship’s mast. On a sinking ship, rat lines were the last refuge for rodents and unlucky tars that couldn’t swim or didn’t make it into a lifeboat. Today, rat lines are thought to be euphemisms for any desperate avenue of escape or last ditch tactics. more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 1:11 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

The Mirage of “National Self-Determination” (and its limits)—Montenegro and Palestine

by Norman Berdichevsky (July 2017)

Gavrilo Princip sparking the Great War, June 28, 1914

Unless you happened to catch the 30 second news item on May 22, 2006 on the more internationally-oriented networks such as the BBC or CNN, you probably don’t know or care that Podgorica is the capital of the newly independent (actually renewed independence after 90 years) state of Montenegro. The independence supporters gained a narrow 55% majority with the aid of many migrant voters returning from abroad and restored the map of the Balkans to more what it looked like in 1914. more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 1:06 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

The Strange Death of Theo Van Gogh

by Fergus Downie (July 2017)

Little Dutch Boy safeguarding the essential. (Artwork built on the work of Marguerite Scott)

Prelude

Surveying the life's work of Theo Van Gogh it is difficult not to read into it metaphors of civilisational decline. A distant relative of the great Artist, he had built his modest acclaim slumming the lowest reaches of 21st-century Prolefeed and, by his late thirties, he had exhausted even this cheap line of scatological obsessions. more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 1:02 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

The Cultification of the American Left: An Inquiry

By D.L. Adams (July 2017)

The purpose of this inquiry is to explain and support the contention that the American political Left is now a Utopian political cult.

Because of its conversion into a cult, the Left viewpoint and its public and official organization, the Democratic party, are no longer politically viable. It will be shown that the cultification of the Democratic party, one of the two leading political parties in the United States, is one of the greatest disasters in American political and cultural history. more>>>

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Posted on 06/30/2017 12:52 PM by NER

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Friday, 30 June 2017

Our German Problem (Or Mine) - A Memory

By Samuel Hux (July 2017)

Defeated German soldier, burning Reichstag.